If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.

- George Washington

Monday 11 March 2013

U+03C9: Greek Small Letter Omega

ω

OK, I give up on this one.  Following recent heartache about a deluge of smelly spam to this blog, I recall that I have noticed one feature of a couple of the early spam posts: somewhere in the post, there would be a Greek omega character (ω) in place of a 'w' in one or more of the words.  Once I had noticed it, I started to look for it, and pretty much every one had an omega somewhere in it.

Now, I don't have enough brains to be able to rack them properly, but I did get out the magnifying glass and a pair of tweezers and fiddle with them a bit.  And I can't for the life of me work out why this should be.  Is it an attempt to create words that will be readable but unrecognised by spam filters?  Or are all the spammers, English-illiterate though some of them are, all closet Greek scholars, channelling Thucidides?

Anyone?

3 comments:

  1. its for tracking purposes
    a search engine can find all the pages where the spam has stuck

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thank you for that. I'm not sure I understand how, but the reason makes sense. Insert an unusual character, wait a while, search for it, and where you find it is where you were successful, and you can redouble your efforts there? Interesting, thank you.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Crafty buggers!

    Just pray that Captcha doesn't add that to its arsenal of obfuscation.

    ReplyDelete

Comment is free, according to C P Scott, so go for it. Word verification is turned off for the time being. Play nicely.

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...